


Like Water Through a Hand

by Orockthro



Category: Aquaman (2018)
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Gen, Gender Non-Conforming Character, Male-Female Friendship, Pre-Movie, atlantis has fucked up gender norms, gender queer vulko
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-29 23:10:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17817323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: “This lesson isn’t befitting a young nobleman like yourself, Nuidis,” her tutor told him as she sat Atlanna down to teach her the ways of moving water with her mind’s eye. “You will grow up to be a soldier, and this is not suitable for men. This is but a trick.”Moving water, moving the very thing that surrounded them and kept them safe and filled their lungs with oxygen-rich water was no mere trick. He craved it like he craved salt, like he would shrivel away without it.(Or, Vulko's journey to wielding water is long and fraught, much like his life. Also much like his life, it is inexorably tied to Atlanna.)





	Like Water Through a Hand

**Author's Note:**

> After watching the movie and talking things out with Dien, I was captivated by the idea that Mera's "waterbending" in the movie might be a weaponized version of something that, like the entirety of Atlantis culture, is highly gendered.  
> Vulko spins water around his spear and teaches the same to Arthur, a feat we only see Mera doing in the movie, and that Orm is taken by surprise with twice (once by Mera, and once by Arthur in their final battle).  
> Coupled with the fact that Vulko does not wear armor, although he's clearly very skilled in battle, I started to tease apart something that I very very much wanted to explore: Vulko as a gender non conforming person trapped, much like Atlanna, in a highly gender-rigid world. 
> 
> A hundred thanks to Dien who is a fantastic person to bounce ideas with, and to TCG who read this through at the last minute for me.

Vulko grew up as one of two dozen noble children swimming through the palace halls, giggling and playing while their parents held a myriad of seats and positions of power. The world was simple for them as children, but that era of simplicity was rapidly changing-- the surfacers had submarines and atomic weapons and, even then, had begun to let their filth seep down towards their home. 

But for a time, a young Vulko was spared that. And for a time he found pleasure and curiosity to be the bright points of his life. 

He would follow Atlanna to her lessons like a lost child, and in some ways he was. He was a few years older than her, and she being the only child of the King was, of course, rigidly looked after. But his mother died and his father had little interest in him, and they often found themselves in one another’s company, and as children do so easily, they became friends. And so he would follow her because Vulko had an appetite for knowledge and a desire for some undefined  _ something else _ that could never be sated. And Atlanna filled that with her bright happiness and play. 

“This lesson isn’t befitting a young nobleman like yourself, Nuidis,” her tutor told him as she sat Atlanna down to teach her the ways of moving water with her mind’s eye. “You will grow up to be a soldier, and this is not suitable for men. This is but a trick.”

Atlanna had stuck out her tongue at him, waggled it around, and then pushed a series of bubbles into his face. Vulko could only watch, enviously, as she did so.

Moving water, moving the very thing that surrounded them and kept them safe and filled their lungs with oxygen-rich water was no mere trick. He craved it like he craved salt, like he would shrivel away without it.

\--

He grew up, as children inevitably do, and shed parts of himself as he grew a thicker skin around his soul. But he never shed his curiosity, nor his desire to move the ocean with a single thought or to hold within himself that ephemeral otherworldly knowledge that Atlanna and other noble girl children were taught. He’d tried to learn on his own, to copy what he saw, but he couldn’t grasp the shape of it. And so he begged Atlanna to teach him many months later when he was fourteen and being fitted for his first set of armor and could no longer stand the not-knowing.

“Why?” She’d laughed. They were sitting in one of the courtyards atop the Palace of Justice; she waiting for her father to finish a session of court, and himself avoiding the weight of armor he did not want to bear. “You heard Kellan. It’s not for boys.”

“Please, Atlanna?”

She was twelve, and already growing into her radiance, although he did not think of her as anything but a friend, and she stared at him with still clarity that shook him and made him think,  _ she will be my queen. _

“For you,” she said, finally. “Tomorrow, after my lessons with Kellan.”

They snuck away that day, and for many days after, and hid behind the statues of the Triumphant Dead while Atlanna showed him how to hold still his hand, to feel the water around him, inside him, and to breathe will into it. He was not a natural with the magic, but he persisted until what was natural was irrelevant. 

“I still don’t understand why you want to learn this. It’s just a thing for girls.” She said it, her long hair floating around her head like a halo, as if moving the ocean with their will and desires was meaningless. 

Vulko bit his lip. “I just do.” 

\--

“You understand your pledge?”

Vulko kneels, one of twenty-odd young men in fitted armor and bowed heads-- his generation no longer children, no longer free to swim the halls without purpose and duty. The metal around his throat and chest is heavy and chafes his skin. It is an honor to serve the king not just as a member of his house as a noble, frittering away his days on meaningless things, but in the mighty military force that is Atlantis’ standing army. 

“I do,” he says, when it is his turn and a heavy trident falls against his shoulder with a clang of metal on metal that reverberates through the water. 

“Welcome to the King’s Guard. You will call me Commander Brahis,” the man says, “And in two years time I will make you fine men.”

Vulko’s new role is confirmed; he is no longer a boy but a man, one who will learn the ways of war and power and violence.

\--

He is sent to his first battle when he is sixteen. A skirmish over control of an eel-rich fishing ground in the boarder seas has erupted with the Brine, and a battation of young men in need of combat experience is sent to quell the dispute, Vulko among them. 

It is brutal and fast. They arrive via carrier ship and descend into the landscape without hesitation. The sea is teeming not just with Brine and Atlantean soldiers, but the floating carcasses of the dead sea life their battle has exterminated; the water is dark with their melding blood. 

He kills three Brine soldiers that day, all three with his spear. Piercing thrusts of dominance as he’s been taught; it is effective and lethal. 

The battle is won in under an hour and they leave the bodies of the Brine to float in the sea like beacons of their triumph; warnings for all who come to the now-barren fishing ground. The valuable fishing sea-life so worth defending just as dead as their enemies. 

Vulko sheds his armor as soon as he is alone and floats naked in the water of his rooms, eyes closed and hands outstretched as he feels the water around him like Atlanna taught him, and curls it around him in an armor he far prefers. 

\--

It is when he’s sixteen, also, that Atlanna learns the name of her betrothed; Orvax Marius. 

She is fourteen, and they are no longer allowed to be together alone. 

Her loss from his life is worse, in some ways, than the loss of his mother because unlike his mother, he and Atlanna had actually grown fond of one another, had actually truly enjoyed one another's company. They sought each other out and were not forced together out of obligation or familial commitment. 

So he is relieved almost to tears that do not suit his warrior self when she sneaks out to the courtyard and sends a page sworn to secrecy to guide him to her. They will not be forced apart, not yet at least. Not while Atlanna wills it. 

They whisper in the dark recesses of the statuary that peppers the courtyard, huddled together like two barnacles, clutching hands under the marble eyes of the Triumphant Dead.

"Have you met him?" she asks. She, of course, hasn't. Orvax Marius is nine years Vulko's senior, and eleven years Atlanna's, and she asks because Marius is in the King's Guard, one of her father’s favorite Generals, the youngest of his generation to slip effortlessly through the command track. 

"I've seen him," he says, because it is true. "He is handsome enough," because it is also true. "They say he is a strong leader of men."

"And is he a strong leader of women?"

She clutches at his hands and he does not know why. He vows to learn. Vulko is young, but he knows truths about himself already, fully-formed knowledge of his deepest self flood his mind: he wishes to know the world's secrets, to know, fully and truly, how everything fits together. He does not know these truths about Atlanna. 

"I do not know."

She lets herself float in the waters and in the dark and eventually says to him, "I taught you some of the women's arts. Will you teach me some of the men's?"

And so he does. He brings her weapons he's secreted from the barracks where he now lives; first a pair of long knives, then a spear, and finally a trident, the last of which she falls in love with. It's crude metal meant for quick and brutal violence, nothing befitting a princess of their fine kingdom, but for the moment it is all Vulko can give to her.

She twirls it in her hands, the metal singing against the water as they once again convene in the dark waters of the royal palace grounds. "I love it," she says, and her face is wild with delight. "It feels powerful. Is this what you feel like every time you go to battle?"

Vulko is perched on the shoulder of a statue wearing nothing but his skinsuit, loose jointed and joyful from just watching her. "No," he says, "I think not. I think you must feel that for both of us."

She twirls and it twirls, and by the time she is sixteen and he eighteen she is as proficient with it as any of his peers. She is a natural, or, like him she refuses to care about natural and has forced her way to near-peerless skill. He supposes in the end it doesn’t matter. 

Her keeping of the trident is no longer a secret; nothing of her life truly ever could be as the king’s only child. But she is doted upon by her father and, in fact, the king gives her a beautiful trident to replace the utilitarian one Vulko pressed into her hands in the dark. She shows it to him one night, beaming, and he is delighted for her, too. 

“He lets me practice against some of his guards. I wish you were one of them, though.”

Vulko has been siphoned out of the general military along with two of his cousins towards the same command track that Atlanna’s betrothed shouldered himself through. He no longer goes to skirmishes in the out-waters, instead he helps plan the battles and positions himself a future in intelligence work. 

He much prefers the work. He no longer has to wear the armor that Atlanna so deeply covets and instead is able to sharpen his mind with tactics and strategy and negotiation training. It suits him better, but it is the best of what is available, not what his being craves. 

“Practice with me now,” he says. And he raises his empty hands and calls the water to him, pressing oxygen molecules one way and hydrogen molecules the other, the bubble a violent bursting ball of energy held between his hands.

Atlanna has become a master at men’s war craft, and so Vulko has become a master of women’s. 

\--

Vulko does meet Orvax Marius, but not for another two years. It is Atlanna’s eighteenth birthday party, and the city, or at least the upper tiers where the highborn live, is alight with spectacle for the occasion. It is also the day that her betrothal to Orvax Marius is re-confirmed, and the two  stand in the center of a mother of pearl dias, hand in hand, and vow to be married with hundreds of onlookers watching their every move. 

Vulko, of course, is among them, and afterwards when rare fishes are passed around on delicate skewers, Orvax Marius approaches him and claps a hand to his shoulder. 

“So you are Nuidis.”

He bows a polite head wishing for the first time for that set of armor. “And you are Marius.” But, in truth, Vulko has never needed armor to hide behind; his words serve him masterfully. Orvax Marius may call him by his first name, but Vulko has no compunction in reminding the man that their relationship is not of equals; Vulko invites very few to call him by the name his mother gave him.

“Atlanna speaks of you often,” Marius says, and there is a glint of something in his eye, a sharpness to his jaw and mouth. 

“She is a good friend,” he says, head no longer bowed and he doesn’t shy from conversation or the imposing stature of the man in front of him. “I am gladdened to know she will be married to a man who understands such things.”

The mouth tightens further. “Of course,” Marius says. “When she is Queen, she will have many duties and won’t have time for old friendships or silly childhood things. And you, young Nuidis, may find yourself far away from here. After all, doesn’t your duty sometimes involve securing the outer-waters?”

Ah, Vulko thinks to himself. A fool I have been, and not half so clever as I need to be.

He excuses himself from the conversation and vows to never be caught a fool again.

\--

Atlanna won’t be married until her twenty fifth birthday. It is the last gift of her dying father. 

Orvax Marius becomes Regent upon his death and won’t be King until he weds, and when Vulko would like most to be comforting Atlanna on the loss of her father, instead he finds himself again in a suit of armor, again sent to the out-waters, again living a life that feels wrong.

He is the leader of a battalion, in deference to his rank. But he is still, very clearly, shunted away from Atlantis as punishment for his friendship with its future Queen. 

“Sir! Commander Vulko!” 

But Vulko has become clever, and he plays his cards carefully. 

“What is it, Bellus?”

“A battalion from Xebel, sir, approach from south south east towards the fishing ground there. Should we attack?”

Vulko holds his spear, but it is just for show; there will be no violence tonight. “No. Line up your troops, lieutenant: stay your ground, but do not attack.”

“Sir?”

“Here,” he says, and hands the boy his spear before he swims south south east towards the incoming swirl of color that marks fighting force from Xebel that is their mirror.

“Honorable Xebel warriors!” he calls out as he approaches. “I am Vulko of Atlantis.”

A broad man in armor that far surpasses Vulko’s in both workmanship and strength own slips free from his mount and closes the waters between them. “And I am Herod of Xebel. These waters belong to us.”

“And Atlantis has long believed them ours.” He holds up a hand when Herod starts to rear back. “It is important, in our trying times, to preserve what we have,” Vulko says, and motions his eyes towards the surface above. “Our fisheries are depleted by toxic seepage, from slaughter from above; it would be folly to continue to damage them ourselves. Surely if we here can see that, our own kingdoms can, too.”

He extends his hand, his lack of spear self evident, and after a long moment, Herod of Xebel reaches out to grasp it. 

There is no bloodshed, and Vulko smiles inwardly that his foes think him unarmed when, thanks to Atlanna, the entire ocean is his protector. They strike a truce that must, of course, be taken to their kings and regents, but it is peace, and both kingdoms are able to send their nets into the fishing ground rather than laying waste to yet another resource. 

When he returns to Atlantis, Orvax Marius must grudgingly pin a medal to his breast.

\--

For awhile he is able to forget about  _ it--  _ the nagging feeling of wrongness he can feel in his bones. He lives his life, climbing the political ladder with aplomb and deftness, providing Atlanna with glimpses of the world outside the palace she no longer leaves; there is no time for anything else. 

And then Atlanna is twenty-five. 

She finds him in the night in his quarters, places a gentle finger on his lips and whispers, “I am leaving,” the morning of her birthday and the morning she is due to be wed to Orvax Marius. “I know that you love me, and so I beg you to tell no one, but I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”

Atlanna has her trident in her hands, and Vulko reaches out to touch it, and then to take her hand into his. 

“Are you sure?” He knows better than to convince her to stay, but his suspicion that she was planning something is different to  _ knowing _ she is leaving. She is twenty five and beautiful and she is his only true friend. “It might--”

“Nuidis.”

His name falls from her lips and he is stilled.

“You could come, too.”

\--

Vulko stays. He’s always been pragmatic.

“Someone must keep them from finding you.”

\--

When Atlanna is gone, Vulko’s life is a dull, crushing monotony, and for all he was able to ignore it before, the feeling of being out of place and wrongly put together fills her absence. 

It’s made worse by Orvax Marius’s absolute certainty that Vulko knows where Atlanna is hiding herself and is a traitor for not telling him. He is not killed or taken to the coral deadlands and left to starve or, worse, taken to the Trench.

He’s simply shunned. 

In some ways it is worse; he is forced to wear his armor, no longer holding a rank high enough to justify his divergence from the norm.

But at night, when it is quiet in the palaces and the light-fish are dark with sleep, he goes to the courtyard he remembers so vividly from his childhood, sheds his heavy burden, and lets the ocean flow through his fingers.

He will be like the water: always moving, strong and slippery, a gentle protector and a vicious killer both.

And so Vulko stays, and waits for clap of change he can sense on the horizon. 

He’ll be ready. 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!  
> I'm strongly considering a sequel set post-movie.


End file.
